A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, acclaimed history A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe, from ancient Palestine to contemporary China.

How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.

Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments.

'A stunning tour de force'
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

'A landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight ... It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language'
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Guardian

'A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book'
John Cornwell, Financial Times

'Essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it'
Melvyn Bragg, Observer, Books of the Year

'Magnificent ... a sumptuous portrait, alive with detail and generous in judgement'
Richard Holloway, The Times

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700, which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Prize.

• ISBN10: 0141021896
• ISBN13: 9780141021898
• Publish Date: 2 September 2010 (first published 24 September 2009)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 1216
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

It took three library renewals to get through this book (and thanks to an ice storm, the fifth this year!, I still owe the library a one day fine, a whole nickel that they thank you for and dump in a desk drawer with a bunch of rubber bands, and I love living in the country and having that library), and then work kind of slammed me a little, so it’s just been sitting there languishing on my currently-reading shelf for two weeks. And in all that time I still haven’t come up with something deeply insightful or clever to say.

I keep coming up with jokes, like, “You know what they say, ‘An atheist is just someone who’s studied their religion.’”

Honestly, this book was really very good. It’s history, which I love, and religious history, which utterly fascinates me with the scale and grandeur of brutality people are willing to inflict on other people in the name of charity and salvation. The whole book— which kept switching from the macro to the micro with expert timing, by the way— I just kept picturing all of this three-thousand-year saga, a hiccup on the evolutionary timescale, playing out from the vast vantage point of elsewhere in our galaxy, where we’re not even a blip of starlight in deep space. And if it didn’t seem petty before, well.

Back down on an earthly scale— or not even that, on a continent’s scale, country by country— the epic and the exhaustive scope of MacCulloch’s research has to be praised. I can’t imagine taking on a scholarship of that magnitude. It’s just bewildering in breadth, and meticulous in detail. All told, though, I much preferred Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God; not because it does the subject more justice, but because it deals with the slightly different angle— the actual evolution of the anthropological and sociological aspects of a religion, as well as what is worshipped within it— that is far more fascinating to me.

For a history of the church, though, you couldn’t do much better than this without devoting your time in semester-sized chunks, and maybe not even then.

Honestly, to hold onto the mystery and conviction of a religion: don’t study its history.